Celebrating 25 Years of the Kanter Award: A Milestone in Work-Family Research
In 1999, Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth had a problem she wanted to solve. Researchers studying work and family were scattered across disciplines including sociology, psychology, management, family studies, and economics, with little awareness of one another’s work. Studies were rarely grounded in strong theory, shared standards for quality were hard to establish, and the field struggled to build on itself in any meaningful way.
Her answer was the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research, named in honor of Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, whose 1977 landmark book, Work and Family in the United States, is widely credited with launching the modern era of work-family scholarship. Kanter had challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that work and personal life were and should remain entirely separate, and her work gave researchers a shared intellectual foundation to build from.
Shelley founded the Kanter Award through the Center for Families at Purdue University with a simple but ambitious goal: identify the best work-family research published anywhere in the world each year, and in doing so, raise the bar for the entire field. More than 60 leading peer-reviewed journals are reviewed annually, with nominees evaluated on scientific rigor, strength of theory, quality of data, and potential to improve the lives of working families. Shelley chaired the award from its founding through 2024, a quarter century of stewardship that helped transform a fragmented area of inquiry into a recognized international field.
Today, the Kanter Award’s library of more than 400 nominated articles is one of the most comprehensive collections of high-quality work-family research available, offering scholars and practitioners a searchable resource for finding and citing the best work in the field. Download the current Zotero Library! It highlights the work of more than 1,000 authors, and the papers nominated for the award have generated more than 60,000 citations.
25 Years In: What the Field Knows and Still Debates
To mark the award’s 25th anniversary, Linda Duxbury of Carleton University, a long-time Kanter Award committee member and leading scholar in the work-family community, led a Delphi study designed to take stock of where the field stands. Shelley was invited to lead the effort with Linda, which felt especially fitting given the award’s milestone year. Published in February 2026 in Community, Work & Family, the paper reports findings from 66 work-family researchers from across disciplines who were asked a deceptively simple set of questions: What do we mean when we call ourselves work-family researchers? And where is the field headed?
The areas of agreement were clear. Virtually all participants agreed that work-family research examines how work and family domains connect and influence one another, and that strong research must consider both domains rather than just one in isolation. Scholars also broadly agreed that the field encompasses how work-family circumstances affect employee well-being, what impact family-friendly workplace policies have on workers and families, and how gender shapes and is shaped by the intersection of work and family life.
But when it came to language and definitions, the consensus broke down. Researchers disagreed about what to call the field itself, whether work-family, work-life, or work-nonwork, and about what the word “family” even means. Some argued that the term family is too narrow, centering married couples with children and excluding the growing number of people in single-person households, chosen families, or non-traditional arrangements. Others pushed back, concerned that broadening to “work-life” would obscure the contributions of researchers focused specifically on family dynamics.
These are not new debates. The study traces them back decades and finds that despite repeated calls for greater clarity, the field has not yet resolved them. From one perspective, this reflects healthy debates that occur continuously, shaping and reshaping researchers’ perspectives. But another perspective is that the need to come to consensus matters more than ever. As work has been transformed by the pandemic and by artificial intelligence, and as family structures continue to diversify, researchers who cannot agree on what they are studying risk losing their ability to influence policy, guide employers, or build cumulative knowledge.
The paper’s conclusion is direct: the field is at a tipping point. Work-family research has matured in many ways, with professional organizations, international conferences, respected journals, and an award that has come to signify excellence across disciplines. What it still lacks is the construct clarity that would allow it to fully function as a discipline. Agreeing on what we mean, not just what we study but what we call it and how we define the terms, is the next necessary step.
The Name Game: Evolving Terminology in Work-Family/Work-Life Research
Author: Linda Duxbury, Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, Andre Lanctot
Publication: Community, Work & Family
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Date: February 2026
https://doi.org/10.1080/13668803.2026.2625888
This article was generated with the assistance of Claude, an AI language model.